Friday, December 30, 2011

Christopher Hitchens is
everywhere now that he’s dead. Quite rightly there have been many tributes but the
best brief one I have seen – pleasingly in the Daily Telegraph – is by his friend Francis Wheen, deputy editor of Private Eye. Money quote:

Who else could claim to
have enjoyed (or, more accurately, endured) the hospitality of both Agatha
Christie and Abu Nidal, or been a friend of both Gore Vidal and Paul Wolfowitz,
or read poetry to Jorge Luis Borges and sheltered Salman Rushdie from the
ayatollah’s assassins?

An obituary
for the great philosopher Michael Dummett. The Brits do these things so well.

MacDoctor has a go at
the anti-obesity campaigners and the proposed tax on sugar. He is a doctor and a
diabetic, so knows quite a bit about this.

If you have ever
wondered what two mimic
octopuses shagging would look like, wonder no longer. The species was
discovered in 1998 and this loved-up couple were filmed in Indonesia in
November 2011. Can you tell who is on top?:

Thursday, December 29, 2011

The 42nd in this occasional series of
reprints from Quote Unquote the
magazine is from the November 1996 issue. Anita McNaught was our Auckland
theatre reviewer from late 1995: here she is on the Watershed production of A Frigate Bird Sings by Oscar
Kightley and David
Fane.

ISLAND QUEENS

“I’m sick of having to per­form, and say
something smart or vicious, but if that’s what they want, that’s what I’ll give
them, because they don’t deserve to see the real me.” The confessional outburst
comes from an unlikely quarter in a play full of quiet truths. Drag queen
Shaninqua is the familiar face of Polynesian cross-dressing. Meeting all our
expectations, from her provocative clothing to her acerbic tongue, she holds a
rein of sexual terror in the small, B-grade nightspot she claims as her own.
She and her sidekick Deja Vu abuse, tease, tickle and thump the punters. They
are the Ultravixens.

But this is not a play about drag –
thankfully. It is a play about identity. Oscar Kightley and David Fane have
reached be­yond the stereotypes, and written a play from the inside. For all
those who felt that silly, voyeuristic efforts like Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert were an insult to the intelligence
of queens, transgenders and their ilk (not to mention the odd unambiguous
cinema-goer), this is, at last, a subtle, beautifully observed study of one of
the most precious and intriguing gifts of Polynesian culture – the third sex.

There is no equivalent for the word
fa’afafine in English: any translation cages the butterfly. It is not “gay”,
not “homo” – these are western concepts, alien to Polyne­sia. It is not
“transvestite” nor transsexual, which are clinical descriptions redolent of
deviance. “Effeminate” implies weakness and a sort of impotence inappropriate
to these deliciously sexual creatures. “Drag” is again a western construct. The
only word that does them justice is “queen” – because there is the
self-consciousness of the Chosen in their bearing.

A breed of boys who won’t be boys, but who
see no need to be girls either, they inhabit a world in-between. These are no
pathetic misfits saving their bar tips to pay for a sex change in Sydney. On
the contrary, they lay claim to both a schlong and a slip.

Traditionally, life in the Islands does not
force them into any performances of sexual parody. They float free. They act as
go-betweens for young men and women separated by religion, taboo and shyness.
They are friends to the women, educators and civilisers of the men.

They are the mischief-makers, clowns,
performers, treasured and celebrated as some of the best dancers and singers.
They are respected teachers, the backbone of the hospitality business and, less
obviously, include some leading bureaucrats and government officials. Island
society could not function without them.

But when they shift out of their culture,
out of their context, it all falls to pieces. We make no space for them here.
Relocated, their own culture acquires a sense of embarrassment and often
disowns them. The church disapproves.

The fa’afafine’s island freedoms begin to
look dubiously amoral in an urban New Zealand setting. And like so many other
aspects of Polynesian life, the fa’afafine have been colonised by western gay
culture, drag and prostitution. But instead of giving them strength and allies,
it’s just a new (culturally subversive) norm to conform to. Their formerly
celebrated duality is overlooked, forgotten, lost in the crush.

This modern metamorphosis is one of the
stress fractures through Island society. “Everybody has roles in our culture,”
observes young fa’afafine Vili. That certainty is his greatest source of
comfort, especially now the family has been uprooted to New Zealand – but it is
to become his torment.

Vili has an innate sense of what it means
to be fa’afafine, but not yet how this fits into his new home. His mother has
died, and it is only natural for him to take over as the “female” head of the
household, caring for his grieving, alcoholic father and athletic younger
brother. He is valued, as long as he doesn’t test the unspoken limits his
father has set. When he tries on one of his mother’s old frocks, the cracks
start to show. Vili’s assets become his liabilities.

Kightley and Fane then set the two worlds
on a collision course. Enter Hugh, captain of the rugby team that Vili’s
brother Sione plays for. Hugh is a kid from New Plymouth, and just as confused
as Vili. He overlooks the inconvenience of Vili’s gender, and sees only the
woman that Vili wants to be. He knows little about Samoan culture, and
understands less. Face value, after a few beers, is enough.

This could be totally implausible, but a
combination of the writing and Geoff Dolan’s performance as an archetypal Kiwi
bloke make it happen. Meanwhile, Vili is in search of role models, as well as
love. He needs other fa’afafine; he finds two drag queens: “Most men see us as
sideshow freaks. Queens of the Pacific! ...They’re only being nice to us be­cause
we’re like some exotic bar decoration... They wouldn’t serve us if we were
ordinary Samoans.” They are hardened, cynical and corrupted. Vili is fragile
and innocent beside them, but drawn inescapably into their world. He makes the
understandable mistake of thinking he is one of them. He learns from their
independence, but drinks too deep.

Iaheto Ah Hi has the gentle understated
Vili and his loss of innocence pitched just right. Director Nathaniel Lees has
coaxed what seems like the optimal performance out of each cast member. Every
role had the potential to become a caricature. It is a tribute to him, in part,
that none of them do – they are all recognisable, tangible, believable.

The staging is bold too, but less
successful. Under the feet of the cast are the golden sands of their Samoan
home. The only props are rocks. This works well for some of the more
ritualistic and allegorical scenes, but without any other help from the
staging, there’s too much miming in the everyday drama. The cast have built up
their characters well, but a certain amount of clumsy make-do impedes them.

The play is physical and energetic, from
the muscular well-oiled bodies of the men at the start to the naked dissolution
of the queens. Tenderness and violence are never separated by much. Frigate Bird goes on to explore the
bonds and dynamics of brotherly love. Sione respects and cares deeply for his
older, girlish brother Vili, supports him against his father’s intolerance and
conformity. Samoan masculinity is not threatened by the fa’afafine; rather, it
is set advantageously against it. But Sione, transplanted into New Zealand, is
also slowly corrupted by the influences around him, the compensatory machismo
of rugby culture. As Vili sets about testing the limits of his family’s
affection, the brothers split into the two least admirable aspects of their
father, his drunkenness and his intransigence.

What do you do when you find that you no
longer have a place in the society you live in, that an accident of birth has
made you an outcast? They have their feminine power, but both within and
outside Frigate Bird the fa’afafine
are at the bottom of the heap, powerless and dependent.

They have only a loose alliance with the
gay community, survive as mere figures of fun in the straight world, are often
too outrageous and controversial to make it in the workforce. They are not
specifically recognised in the Human Rights Acts which confer protection from
discrimination. And they are Polynesian. This is partly why so many end up as
habitues of K Road. It’s about survival. And yet these people have a mystical
heritage, a respected, almost ceremonial role in their island homes. They have
a need to be valued, to be taken seriously.

Kightley and Fane go beyond the simple
pathos to explore the real fears of these special, vulnerable people. Theirs is
a culture where from birth to death you are rarely alone: the houses have no
walls, each building packed with siblings, extended families, life is
structured around familiar obligations – privacy is an unfamiliar state. So to
be cast out, to be without a family, to be alone in the world, is for these
people a kind of hell. Loneliness holds the greatest terror of all.

Kightley and Fane have written a classic of
New Zealand theatre. The Edinburgh Festival talent scouts extended an immediate
invitation this year when the play premiered in Wellington. It should fascinate
them up in the North. It will open a few eyes down this way too.

UPDATE

Anita
McNaught is currently based in London and Istanbul as a roving
correspondent for Al Jazeera English.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

There is a new-born donkey at the end of the
next road. The mother is called Lucy even though she is a jenny. And I learn
that there are two emus in the paddock behind, which brings to umpteen the
total of species I have noticed in that road: dairy cows, Highland cattle, sheep, pigs,
donkeys, Shetland ponies, alpacas, horses, ducks, chickens and pheasants.

There were goats but they died of old age. This afternoon I
had a long conversation with their owner, who turned her quarter-acre front yard where
they used to live into a vegetable garden and had people queuing up to buy her
new potatoes for Christmas. She wondered whether certified seed potatoes were
necessary every year – I say no but then I am not growing semi-commercially –
and which varieties are best at this time of year. We moved on to lettuces and
courgettes, and whether it was better to water the maize patch late at night or early
in the morning. The latter, we decided.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

The 41st in this occasional series of
reprints from Quote Unquote the
magazine is from the August 1993 issue. The portrait is by John McDermott.
The intro read:

Marilyn
Duckworth is one of our most important writers, yet her new novel Seeing Red has not been included in the
Top 20 of the Women’s Book Festival. It deals with an embarrassing subject in
Women’s Suffrage Year – female violence. Here she talks to Elizabeth
Knox about the background to her writing and the many traps and sudden
twists that imperil her characters.

SOCKING IT TO THEM

We get down to it in the study at the front
of the imposing, two-storey brick house Mar­ilyn Duckworth shares with her
husband John Batstone. I’m on the couch with my back to the street, where she
likes to work, with the good light and all the distractions of traffic behind
her. Marilyn sits beside her laptop, which is crowded to the edge of the desk
by earlier, defunct computers and an old television. We both have our tape
recorders.

Marilyn wants to listen to the interview
and vet any errors or unwise confidences – a trick of politicians, she
explains. Her tape recorder wheedles away throughout the interview, recording
its own feedback so that, in the end, she can’t bear to listen to it.

So much for precautions. In a Duckworth
novel this would be a significant detail of the plot, one of those bits of
misfired planning that can determine the lives of her characters.

She was born in New Zealand but removed to
England as a three-year-old at the beginning of World War II. “War broke out
when we were on the boat. I was aware of the war, but much more of a measles
epidemic. The ship was divided by a rope. That was much more significant. I
remember being so hot with measles that I took off all my clothes and lay on
the lino floor.”

Her father, psychologist John Adcock, who
had gone ahead, sent a cable to his wife Irene, telling them all to get off the
ship at Cape Town and return home. England was too dangerous. But the radio
operator was talking to his girlfriend and missed a few cables, including this
one.

During the war, Marilyn and her older
sister Fleur spent longish periods separated from one or both parents. “We were
with relatives in Leicestershire, then to Wiltshire. I feel I’ve lived lots of
lives and several childhoods and instantly adapted. Take accents – in Wiltshire
I lived with a Welsh family and when I came back to my family no one could
understand what I was saying, My mother couldn’t. I said ‘Aye’ not ‘Yes’. Then
I went straight to Cockney. I remember an argument about whether it was all
right to say ‘isn’t’. I thought you had to say ‘ain’t’ or you were up
yourself.”

With all these moves Fleur and Marilyn were
thrown upon each other’s company. I ask her about their “imaginary game”.
Apparently she and her sister corresponded with someone “doing a thesis on
these things”: the Bronte sisters; A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble; the Adcock
sisters.

“We called it Dreamland. It was set in a
boarding school. I always wanted to go to boarding school. The classes were
named after birds – English birds of course – robins, cuckoos, starlings. There
were wicked teachers who we lampooned. And friends – because we shifted a lot
it was useful having these friends who were fixed. We went for escapades.

“I would always be most interested on going
to the Enchanted Forest, and doing very fairy-story things. Then Fleur, being
older than me, dragged in the idea of going to the Land of Happy Meetings,
where you met boyfriends. We got there by hooking our way through the trees
with long walking-sticks, like monkeys.”

Sometime during these years – the game
spanned the Adcocks’ “massive shift” back to New Zealand when Marilyn was 11 –
both sisters began to write. Marilyn planned and began writing her first novel A Gap In The Spectrum when pregnant with
her first child (after a very youthful marriage). There was an interval of over
five months when the manuscript went seamail to London and the publishers
looked it over. After it was accepted there was another year till publication.
Marilyn was 23 and a mother of two.

“Early success felt fantastic. I’d always
promised myself I’d get a novel published, but promising yourself and actually
finding it come true! It certainly made me feel a different sort of person.”

But since her publisher was on the other
side of the world there were no book launches and publishers’ lunches. “I
already knew some local poets but the novelists came later – though I knew Ian
Cross.” Duckworth frowns. “I remember Ian came around one night, we were having
a drink, he and my then husband Harry Duckworth, and Ian said to me that the
reason I wrote was because I was unfulfilled as a person. This upset me – would
he have said that if I were a man? I’d written two novels by then, the first
was out and the second was on its way.”

Duckworth’s third novel was produced in
difficult circumstances. She had a Literary Fund scholarship, so felt bound to
deliver. “I spent three months in Auckland writing

A
Barbarous Tongue. I got a job in the London Lending
Library and wrote at night. I found it was the only way I could do it. My
mother-in-law moved in and minded the kids. I could manage to write a novel
while I had a fulltime job – but with the children at home I couldn’t. I felt
torn two ways. In Auckland I felt guilty and missed the kids. There were times
when I’d ring up Wellington in the middle of the night – I had a key to the
shop, I’d let myself in and sob down the phone.”

The fourth novel before the gap in
Marilyn’s career (from 1969’s Over The
Fence Is Out to 1984’s Disorderly
Conduct) she wrote by swapping her children with those of an artist friend
so that both women secured one free day a week to work. “It was a really hard
way to do it and I don’t know how I could do it now. Well, no, I suppose I
became used to disciplining myself in that way.”

Duckworth’s use of “freetime” has been
further complicated since she developed narcolepsy in her 20s. If she didn’t
get a good 11 hours’ sleep each night she would quite literally fall asleep on
her feet, without warning, anywhere and any time.

Duckworth is now one of our established
writers, a position that entails various du­ties. She was one of the judges of
the 1992 New Zealand Book Awards, and didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the
experience. “I hated the responsibility of judging other writers. But acting as
a judge in competitions is part of the business of being a writer – like this
interview and getting up on pan­els – which is totally against a writer’s
personality often.

“The reason I started being a writer was I
wanted to do something on my own, and not have to fit in with others. I hated
group activities at school. Like reading in groups, I’d get terribly nervous
and start to cough, so that just as it was getting to my turn everyone would
start coughing.”

Seeing
Red is Duckworth’s 11th novel, a pithy book, set in
contemporary Wellington. It concerns two sisters: Isla, “La Stupenda”, a
lesbian, botanical gardener who nurses a very personal but hurtful secret; and
Vivienne, a divorced mother made redundant from her job by shonky financial
dealings. And, in significantly symmetrical contrast to the sisters, there is
an English couple, dubbed “the Burberries” after their coats – and also because
they are cloaked, in a way, and uncannily alike.

“I wanted an alien couple, locked into a
frozen existence, who could affect both sisters. Jake and Jennet needed to be
foreign to the sisters; that’s why I brought them from England, from a
different, a European, culture – also so there would be no witnesses to their
early lives.”

I point out that the author is a kind of
witness, as there is a small section early on in the book in which a child,
later identifiable as Jennet, refuses to swallow a worm tablet and renounces
God. Marilyn says she wanted that section to have a mythical feel to it.

“Jennet sees herself as something of a
witch, she wants power. Life became so intolerable when she was little that she
wants to be wicked. She’s abused and becomes a abuser.”

A different note enters Duckworth’s voice.
“You know Seeing Red hasn’t made it
on to the Women’s Book Festival Top 20. It’s been suggested – not too seriously
– that women’s violence isn’t an appropriate topic for Suffrage Year. I see
women’s anger as very much a feminist issue. If you start not talking about it,
then you’re creeping back to that silence that women have laboured under for
years.”

It is clear that Marilyn Duckworth doesn’t
think much of permissible politics and forbidden points of view. She is not,
however, a “political” novelist; or someone who, like Margaret Drabble, writes
“novels of ideas”. In Duckworth’s novels politics become a detail of private
life. Disorderly Conduct (joint
winner of the New Zealand Book Awards in 1985) is set during the 1981 Springbok
Tour; Message From Harpo has as its
backdrop public wrangling over the Homosexual Law Reform Bill of 1985; other
novels are concerned with the “spirit of the age”. Duckworth says she is
interested in how the ideas people have determine how they treat each other.

“When I bring in politics I’m never trying
to portray what is going on in the world, just what’s going on in these
people’s lives. I hope I also get across an attitude.”

Sometimes she has been accused of having
characters who are passive – specifically her women characters; the men, she is
told, are unreliable bastards. “I’m interested in human weakness – not
passivity, it can be the opposite. I do have women characters who are put-upon,
clumsy rather than weak. Of course there are different ways of being active and
what I’m writing about is surviving.

“I write about traps. Quite often the trap
is love, but not just romantic love; it can be siblings – it is in Seeing Red – or children and parents.
It’s not all about ‘marriage’. Too many people come out and say I write
disparagingly about marriage.”

I suggest that perhaps what these reviewers
are responding to is the way in which her characters often see themselves as
ordinary; that I think her fiction is about the oddity in ordinary people and
the odd lives that overtake people who expect things to be more ordinary. “Yes,
I like to twist things slightly, set up expectations then shatter them. When I
say I’m interested in human weakness, I want it to be seen that it’s equal
across the genders. That’s why I did Pulling
Faces through a man’s eyes. He was the one who felt put upon and who was
trying to get it right.

“And the title of Message From Harpo – the telegram Harpo sent in fact read ‘No
message’. When I’m writing I can’t have an audience in my head. If there was an
audience how could you possibly write without being self-conscious and
posturing?

“So far as style goes I don’t believe in
being distracting. I want people to puzzle a bit but I want a surface that’s
negotiable – where everything is accessible yet underneath this, subtle
vibrations are going on. I think the important thing is for people to read
what’s there and feel that even if it’s bizarre it’s somehow inevitable.”

Finally, I ask whether she has ever
considered writing an autobiography – those by Frame, Shadbolt and Edmond have
made these highly visible in the national litera­ture. “No, not really. I have
a fantastic story to tell, but it’s full of unpublishable material. There are
too many people involved.”

“Too many young ones for you to outlive
them?”

“Yes. The only thing that would lead me to
write one would be if someone else was going to write a version that” – she
laughs – “conflicts with mine. I’m very concerned about truth – my version of
the truth.”

Friday, December 23, 2011

The previous post, Phyllis
Gant on Ronald Hugh Morrieson, was this blog’s 999th. The first, on 9
December 2008, was a celebration of US composer Elliott Carter’s 100th
birthday. The 988th on 11 December 2011 was a celebration of his 103rd.

But the intention of
the blog was to put online material from what Jolisa Gracewood on Public
Address last year generously
called “the defunct – but dead funky – literary mag Quote Unquote”. The magazine ran for 44 issues from June 1993 to
March 1997, and when my friend Rob O’Neill observed that these days “if it’s
not online it doesn’t exist”, I thought – yes. For most people, if you can’t
Google it, it might as well never have existed. So I have been posting material
that may still be of interest. There are interviews with New Zealand and
overseas authors, articles by New Zealand writers on everything from motorbikes
to dogs, reminiscences of writers and artists, a bunch of stuff.

Because I don’t have
the original Word files any more, I have to reconstruct each piece before
posting – it takes about half an hour per original page so a major story can
take two or three hours, which is why there have been only 40 so far. Plus I
always ask the writer’s permission – photographers and illustrators too – which
takes even more time. (Coming soon: Elizabeth Knox on Marilyn Duckworth! And,
if I can find her and get her approval, Anita McNaught on Oscar Kightley and
David Fane!)

When you run a blog you
can see where readers come from and it makes it all worthwhile to see how many
people around the world have read Iain Sharp on James K Baxter, Kevin Ireland
on Frank Sargeson, Nigel Cox on Maurice Gee, Barbara Else on Annie Proulx, Tim
Wilson on Sam Hunt, Carroll du Chateau on Alan Duff, Michael King and Louise
Callan on Robin Morrison, Peter Bland on Bill Manhire and so on.

In between blogging
content from the magazine, I put up other stuff just to keep the thing alive –
whatever interests me and may entertain friends and others (hence
all the music), plus the occasional comment on NZ literary matters.

So this is the 1000th
post. What to do? How to mark the occasion? Thanks to David Thompson,
that’s easy
– with a video of a frog:

The 40th in this occasional series of
reprints from Quote Unquote the
magazine is from the November 1996 issue.

The intro read:

Phyllis Gant recalls her night with Ronald Hugh
Morrieson.

BRIEF ENCOUNTERThere’d be no partying for me. I went to my
room in the newly-built student hostel with a monumental migraine. After trying
to doze off I was suddenly alert: “There’s a man outside my window,” and told
myself not to be silly. Then, in the glow from an outside light, a hand
appeared, clutching the sill. There was a low moaning. The hand fell away.

I slammed the window shut. Below it I could
see a figure on all fours. Terrified, I watched it crawl away, pulled the
curtains together and, trembling, got back into bed, my head throbbing.

Presently there was a rattling at the
window: he was trying to get in. “Go away!” I yelled, panic-stricken. “Some
drunk, can’t find his room.” After a few minutes I peered out. He was sidling
along the wall and away.

All was quiet; the migraine was settling
down to something like bearable, and I slept – to be awaked by the sound of a
male voice crying, “Help me! Oh, someone please help me!”

I looked out the window but could see
nothing. The cries and moans continued. They seemed to be some little distance
away and I decided there must be someone nearer to whoever it was than I, one
of the men. He would go.

“Oh please! Someone help me! Please help
me!”

I leapt out of bed in my long wincey
nightie, not stopping to put on a dressing gown or slippers, and ran outside.

It took some minutes to find him. “Where
are you?” I called. “Where are you?”

It was dark in the quad and the ground had
been rotary-hoed. Shivering with cold and fright, I stumbled on the damp,
sticky lumps of earth, my feet frozen.

There was a shape on the ground: I didn’t
believe it, it was only a shadow. At that moment my ankle was gripped hard and
I almost fell. I had met Ronald Hugh Morrieson.

It was only the second time Morrieson had
been away from Hawera, the occasion, the writers’ conference held at Massey
University in August 1973.

He stood out, with his paper-white moon
face and his loose overcoat; someone said he had just come out of hospital,
straight from hospital and onto the train to the conference. Fellow writers
pointed him out: “That’s Morrieson.” It was said that he had written a number
of important novels, but no one in New Zealand would publish them. There was
talk of one, possibly two, being published in paperback in Australia.

He was a man of mystery, a man alone. When
he got to his feet at one of the sessions, what he had to say confirmed the
suffering his appearance suggested.

A brisk, older woman, German-Jewish I would
guess from her features and accent, took issue with his criticism of his
country, along with his remarks about his own depression and despondency. “You
do not know how lucky you are to live in this beautiful land!” she cried.
“Depressed? What have you to be depressed about? Everybody should be just so
happy! No one in New Zealand need be depressed!”

Morrieson said not a word, simply looked at
her, incredulous, from his depths.

Thereafter this lady took him in hand,
pursuing him relentlessly and plumping down beside him at mealtimes,
interminably extolling the beauty and bounty of our wonderful land, cajoling
him into conversation, self-justification, and a resigned, even tolerant
acceptance of her dubious comfort. It wasn’t easy for anyone else to get a look
in; I’d like to meet him, I thought, but I can’t compete with that.

Now I called for help. The man was
floundering in mud. All was quiet, the rooms dark. I tried to prise his fingers
loose. “I’ll fall if you grip me like that,” I said, reasonably.

Taking him by the hand and trying to drag
him to his feet was beyond my strength. I got my hands under his arms and
somehow got him precariously upright. We proceeded, he leaning heavily on me,
to cross that no-man’s land to a concrete path.

I was going at the knees and back; I had to
have help. As we reached a lit area, two male students, tittering, passed by.

“Help me, please help me,” I said. We must
have looked a comedy turn there on the path in the middle of the night, a
middle-aged woman in a bedraggled nightie and bare, mud-caked feet, and what
appeared to be a paralytic drunk covered in mud.

“Oh please don’t go,” I said. “I really do
need help – this man is ill.”

With that they came back and between them,
no trouble for two strong blokes, got Morrieson up to his room, undressed, and
into bed.

Morrieson went back to Hawera next morning,
leaving a message of thanks for “the kind lady”.

It would be nice if I could recall the
things Morrieson said. Maybe it was here that he observed he “hoped he wasn’t
going to be one of those poor buggers who become famous after their deaths”; I
don’t know.

He did speak bitterly of the rejection of
his work in his own country, of the anguish of keeping on writing in a climate
of indifference and a state of isolation.

And he has proved to be “one of those poor
buggers” after all.

UPDATE

Phyllis Gant, author of the novels Islands (1973) and The Fifth Season (1976), died in April 2010, aged 87.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Further
to six previous posts – most recently this
one which links to all the others – fisking North & South’s ridiculous claim that “most New Zealand fiction
sells a mere 300 copies” and
“most New Zealand novels struggle for recognition and sales” because the
book-buying public is not interested in our literary fiction, here is Nielsen
BookData’s list of NZ
fiction bestsellers for 2011:

1. The Conductor, Sarah Quigley

2. The Larnachs, Owen Marshall

3. Hand Me Down World, Lloyd Jones

4. The Hut Builder, Laurence Fearnley

5. The Parihaka Woman, Witi Ihimaera

6. Mr Pip, Lloyd Jones

7. As the Earth Turns Silver, Alison Wong

8. Hokitika Town, Charlotte Randall

9. The 10pm Question, Kate de Goldi

10. La Rochelle’s Road, Tanya Moir

Back in August I had the sales figures for the fiction bestsellers to July. That list is
almost exactly the same, except now Witi Ihimaera’s The Parihaka Question replaces Hamish Clayton’s brilliant Wulf:

1. Hand Me Down World, Lloyd Jones1955

2. The Conductor, Sarah Quigley1617

3. As the Earth Turns Silver, Alison Wong960

4. Hokitika Town, Charlotte Randall839

5. The Larnachs, Owen Marshall807

6. Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones807

7. La Rochelle’s Road, Tanya Moir804

8. Wulf, Hamish Clayton681

9. The Hut Builder, Laurence Fearnley675

10. The 10pm Question, Kate de Goldi669

I noted then that:

Mister Pip
was published in 2006, The 10pm Question
in 2008, As the Earth Turns Silver in
2009, Hand Me Down World and The Hut Builder in 2010. They have all
probably sold a few copies before. Truckloads, in some cases. The Hut Builder will inevitably sell
loads more in the next six months because it won the fiction prize in this
year’s NZ Post Book Awards.

Of the 2011 novels, Hokitika Town was published in February,
La Rochelle’s Road in April, The Conductor in May, The Larnachs in June and The Parihaka Woman in October. Which
means that The Conductor and The Parihaka Woman must have sold
astoundingly well in the last seven and three months respectively.

The point of the North & South article seemed to be
that we don’t buy New Zealand literary fiction – but on this list of 2011
fiction bestsellers (which doesn’t include the Christmas rush) nine of the 10
are literary. I’d be very happy to see more genre titles up there
but still it is nice to see that we do, in fact, buy New Zealand literary
fiction. Case closed.

The 39th in this occasional series of
reprints from Quote Unquote the
magazine is from the October 1996 issue.

The intro read:

Duncan Sarkies has come a long way from his
early triumph on Spot On. Just don’t
call him quirky. and don’t ever call him a playwright. “Theatre is a hideous
word,” he tells Janet Tyler.

IF THE LABEL FITS

“If you could call us the generation that
hates being given a label, then we are that generation.” Duncan Sarkies’ elfin
face cracks open into an ingenuous laugh. “Generation X – the generation that
hates being given a label,” he says again. “Yes, we’re a paradoxical
generation.”

Although Sarkies claims to barely being
able to struggle his way through a book (an indelible mark of the TV
generation), you couldn’t accuse him of lacking commitment. Highly cynical yes,
apathetic no. At twenty-six, he has written five plays, or rather five he
considers worth crediting to his name: Love
Puke, Ceramic Camel, Snooze, Blue Vein and Saving Grace.
In 1994 he won the Bruce Mason Playwright Award. He performed in this year’s
Auckland Comedy Festival and Edinburgh Festival. In conjunction with three
other playwrights, brought together by producer Pat Cox, he is writing a
feature-film script which has already managed to break through the first round
of film funding.

Oh, and when he was 14 he won the Spot On scriptwriting competition.
“Yeah, hideous thing. I cringe now. There was one called April 1st – bit of tomfoolery at school on April Fools Day. And
they did make it. It haunts me. I lock it away.”

Spot
On competitions aside, there are few worries for
Sarkies that he’ll be one of those never to rise beyond the mediocre – an issue
which used to concern him in the past as he hammered away through Dunedin
winters of discontent. He makes an analogy with his learning to play the guitar
at school: learning with extraordinary speed, getting all the notes down with
prodigious aptitude, and well, for want of a better phrase, everything looking bright
and rosy. For a time. A regrettably brief time. To this day he can’t do bar
chords.

“And I’d always had that with my writing. I
had that potential and I was always worried that I couldn’t push that step
further, that I’d just get stuck at that point, that I’d always be a bright
starter with nothing coming through. But hopefully that’s not happening. I
think I’m getting better and better at what I’m doing.”

From a “vaguely” middle-working-class
background, Sarkies finds it absurd that he should be able to make a living
simply out of selling his ideas. (Not of course that he is making a living out
of doing it, but, yeah, sometime soon, very soon...) “I mean,” he says, “who
wants to listen? I desperately want to say these ideas but, I don’t know, I find
myself making excuses for doing what I do all the time. I used to say if I
really wanted to go out and help the world I should be doing this and this and
this, and working here and working there, but then I think, there are a lot of
bank tellers out there and it’s not like they’re doing any more than I am.
They’re not doing any less than I am
either.” He pauses. “Or, that’s debatable, but you know.”

He also finds himself dodging the “What do
you do?” question old school friends seem determined to ask. “I never say I’m a
playwright, because that’s a hideous word. And I never say I’m into theatre,
because theatre – that’s also a hideous word. You can’t help it whenever you
say the word ‘theatre’, it reeks of pretension and you can’t get away from it.
So I say I do plays and stuff, which sounds like, ‘oh yeah’.”

Sarkies’ plays have similar quirky (used
with subversively sarcastic intent) narratives. Love Puke is about the trials and tribulations of eight young
people in and out of romance, with “Is love a bodily function?” its premise and
a lot of “toilet stuff’ in there to contrast directly against the high ideal of
love; Snooze is about a man who falls
in love with his alarm clock; Blue Vein
(written with Ted Brophy) has a man who becomes addicted to cheese; and Saving Grace is about a man called
Gerald, who meets a woman called Grace at Social Welfare, and over the course
of time they discover in each other strength and power – and yes, things go
haywire.

“The first time someone called me quirky,”
says Sarkies, “I thought it was great – but then, now that it’s written all the
time. I guess quirky just means off-centre, and I guess I am off-centre, so I
suppose I shouldn’t resent the fact of being quirky.” His tone remains
unconvinced.

As unconvinced as he is by the “comedy”
label often attached to his work: “When you use the term comedy, it sounds like
the primary function of comedy pieces is to make people laugh.” But Sarkies
doesn’t write with the aim of being funny; he writes about things that interest
him. It’s just that those things have an unnerving tendency to come out funny.

As with most artists, Sarkies would like
his work to appeal to everyone - but not at the expense of writing something
interesting, “to put it bluntly”. He believes he has the capability of creating
a well-written play that cajoles people into laughing and crying in all the
right places, a play that’s cleverly written and well-structured, and with all
the loose ends tied up in the end... “But, I don’t know, I’ve seen it before,
I’ve seen it too many times before, and I’d rather risk offending people. I’d
rather come in uninvited and leave a mess.” On reflection, he reckons his work
is pretty much universally liked, at least by the under-30 age group.

It’s from the under-30s that Sarkies’ influences
come – especially local comedians Sugar and Spice, Radar and Jo Randerson.
These comedians, like Sarkies, enjoy taking ideas to their extreme. And though
Ionesco’s absurdist Rhinoceros holds
influential sway, the television serial The
Young Ones, which threw anarchy in the pot and subtlety out the window, can
claim as much, if not more, credit.

“We all loved it, because it was gross and
it was stupid. The Young Ones is
probably more influential than a lot of us realise. I think sometimes it’s to do
with being sick of calling art Art. Art can be such a highbrow/lowbrow thing.

“Maybe that’s a difference in our
generation. We like the thought of declassifying, of meshing together differing
styles. All we’re really doing is reflecting the world we live in. It’s an
unfortunate thing, but there’s a gross Americanisation, the role of advertising
has increased... All these things have changed us, so when we reflect the world
we know back onto the stage, suddenly it looks different, because it is
different, because we’re different –
and that all fits back into the Generation X thing, I’m sure.

“God,” he hesitates with an edge of comic
abhorrence, “I’m beginning to sound like a champion of the Generation X.” Yeah,
but only if the label fits.

UPDATE

There is more recent
information on Duncan Sarkies here, from the
1999 movie Scarfies to two episodes
of Flight of the Conchords to the
2008 novel Two Little Boys.

Last week, I mentioned
that our American friends the
Frums came to stay and we all debated the euro. David and Danielle were
also very kind to our labrador Dido, and advanced the interesting theory that
the paws of all Labradors smell of popcorn. Being English, I affected not to
know what popcorn smells like, but the Frums are, in fact, right. Consultation
with canine experts suggests that this property is unique to the breed. No one
knows why.

It is several years since I
had a labrador on hand so I cannot test this immediately but the next time I
see one and I am sure that no one is looking, I shall sniff its paws.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Further to my post
about Danyl at the Dim-Post getting all satirical about Shelley Bridgeman’s Herald column on the vast
international chemtrail conspiracy and his invitation to readers to submit
parodies of NZ novels rewritten in Bridgeman’s style, I received the above
image the other day. It was a Christmas card from my friend Mary McIntyre who
painted this, Celebrating One Tree Hill (69 x 49 cm), earlier this year.

Spooky or what? I sent
a copy of the image to Danyl who replied that the painting would make an
excellent prize for his competition. If there is a philanthropist out there who
would care to stump up the necessary, the painting is available for purchase
from her dealer, Whitespace.

There are more images by
Mary at the gallery’s website, including Skylarking
(38 x 48 cm), also from 2011. Either one would do, really:

(Here
is Keith Stewart’s 1996 essay on Mary for Quote Unquote, and here is me last year.)

47. Any new book longer than 500 pages is a
stupefying act of self-importance.

Poegles
are a new concept to me, a mash-up of Google search results on a specific term
as as a poem:

Whatever you think of Google as a tool,
constructing a poegle re-imagines the search engine as a digital Ouija board,
offering chance, surprises, and maybe even a little mysticism.

This grass sledge
is the perfect present for a child whose parents have too much money. When I
was a kid sliding down Mount Maunganui, cardboard worked. This costs £349.
Luxury!

The English poet Christopher Logue died
recently. He is most famous for his rendering of Homer’s Iliad which he did despite knowing no Greek. Interesting choice for
a pacifist. He was a frequent contributor to Private Eye, too. Here is his poem “London Airport”:

Sunday, December 18, 2011

The December 2011 issue of Metro magazine has a poem by Ian
Wedde, the new poet laureate, whom the magazine commissioned to mark the
centenary of the Auckland Town Hall this month. A nice idea. The poem begins:

In 1965 it was Charlie Mingus in the Auckland Town Hall...

A few lines later, he:

struck a chord that might have tameshiwaried

a pile of glass bricks

and left the stage for a hat change…

Later that night, the narrator is in St
Stephens Ave, Parnell, and speaks to the legendary jazz bassist, who lifts his
hat before replying.

This is odd, because as far as I can tell
Charles Mingus never played in New Zealand – he certainly didn’t in 1965
because according to Gene Santoro’s excellent biography Myself When I Am Real: the life and music of Charles Mingus he
didn’t leave the US at all that year.

On the other hand, the legendary jazz
pianist Thelonious Monk – who was known for his hats – did play here in 1965. I know this because I saw him perform at the
Tauranga Girls’ College hall, the poor bastard, and I know that after the
Auckland concert he was in Parnell because my friend Bernard Brown was at a
party in St George’s Bay Rd, the lucky bastard, where Monk played Debussy and
also duets with a local concert pianist – David Galbraith, I think. There were,
Bernard says, “jazz cigarettes” in the room. Fancy that.

Still, the Auckland Town Hall concert in
January 1976 which features in the poem’s second half, did happen. I was there
and it was great because it was Frank Zappa and he played a lot of guitar and, as always, he had a
really good drummer: this time it was Terry Bozzio. You can hear what the band
sounded like on the double-CD FZ:OZ recorded in
Sydney on the same tour. It features Norman Gunston on harmonica, as a result
of this interview Gunston did with
Zappa.

YouTube has more Gunston for younger viewers:
I am sure that Sacha Baron-Cohen would acknowledge that Ali G/Borat didn’t come
out of nowhere. Where the hell Gunston came from is anybody’s guess. Some sort
of Paul Holmes/Paul Henry timewarp thing?

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

F. Scott Fitzgerald
wrote in The Last Tycoon that there
are no second acts in American lives. Serial
adulterer, former Speaker of the House and current aspirant Republican
presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is
currently having a good go at disproving this theory. As a reminder of how Mr
Gingrich was regarded last time around, here is Ike Willis with “Eye of Newt” from
his 1998 album Dirty Pictures. Sample
lyric:

When that crazy
Republican

came a’ barrellin’ down
the political chute

How could we ever know?
When will he ever go?

We're a nation under
the Eye of Newt.

Why is he so very,
bible-thumpin’ reactionary?

Square of head and
square of chin

All he wants is a
perfect world,

for American boy and
girl

Just as long﻿ as they
look like him

Fun fact: Willis played
guitar and sang with Frank Zappa for many years and was a member of his 1988
band, as heard on the double CD set The
Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life. Which means that Willis can play
guitar in 17/8 and sing a reggae version of “Stairway to Heaven”, though from
memory not necessarily at the same time.

Here is Zappa himself
on the subject of newts. This clip from his movie 200
Motels, possibly one of the worst movies ever made, starts with the
dance sequence “The Lad Searches The Night For His Newts” before we get “The
Girl Wants To Fix Him Some Broth” (which contains the line “Some nice soup,
with small dogs in it”), “Little Green Scratchy Sweaters and Corduroy Ponce”,
“A Nun Suit Painted On Some Old Boxes”, “Dental Hygiene Dilemma” and “Does This
Kind Of Life Look Interesting To You”. Warning: contains Keith Moon dressd as a
nun. The soprano is Phyllis
Bryn-Julson who made a memorable recording of Pierre Boulez’s Pli Selon Pli and performed with him and
the Ensemble Contemporain in a wonderful performance of Boulez and Birtwistle
at the Wellington Arts Festival in 1988.

I love the soundtrack to
this but accept that I am in a vanishingly small minority. However, Theodore Bikel (who was in the movies The African Queen and My Fair Lady and starred in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway for,
like, forever) is undeniably great in it, especially in the closing song where
he sings the timeless lyric, “Lord, have mercy on the people in England, for
the terrible food these people must eat.”Also
on YouTube.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

The GPS of my dreams would be voiced by Fenella Feilding or Jennifer
Ehle who played Elizabeth Bennet opposite Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy in the BBC
Pride and Prejudice and is the
sexy-posh voice at the start of this
great Divine Comedy song, “To Die a Virgin”:

The New
ZealandHerald is not a newspaper
that often surprises its readers, but this
surprised me:

When my daughter was a baby and a
preschooler, I tried hard to get my head around the subject of child car-seats. Slowly but surely I discovered what was legally required, what was recommended and what was simply best practice. I did research, identified the experts, asked the difficult questions, took notes and felt grateful that, as a journalist, these procedures were almost second nature to me. I recall tracking down Plunket’s Dunedin-based national coordinator to quiz her about whether front-facing child car-seats could go in the front seat of a car. (They could but only if the backseat was occupied or there wasn't a backseat – and as long as there were no operational airbags.) And I remember thinking what a minefield it all was and wondering how parents who were non-journalists fared in getting all the information they needed.

Occupy Wall Street will be taking over the
classroom next semester. The Department of Social and Cultural Analysis has
announced that it will be offering a course on the movement this spring.

The course will explore the history and
politics of debt and take a deeper look at the economic crisis the movement is
protesting. It will be taught by SCA profesor Lisa Duggan.

“Occupy Wall Street has done us all the
service of illuminating [the fact] that the economy operates within the
framework of political, social and cultural conflicts, and not outside them,”
she said. [. . .]

CAS junior Vijay Mirchandani said he thinks
the class will educate people who haven't been following the movement thus far.

“The fact that the economy and Wall Street
are increasingly a part of everyday life is all the more reason for people to
know about it,” he said.

Have to love that “increasingly”.

Peter Bearman, professor of sociology at
Columbia University, also expressed enthusiasm about the new course.

“OWS as a topic of study offers prismatic
opportunities to consider the changing shape of inequality in our society and
the dynamic processes of repertoire change in social movements globally, from
the picket line to the sit-in, to the consideration of life course
trajectories, among other themes central to the sociological apprehension of
the modern context,” he said.

First commenter out of the box asks:

Will Prof Duggan be teaching
students about not wasting money they don’t have on worthless courses that
leave them in debt with no hope of a job?

The Daily
Telegraph does good obituaries and this
is a classic. The intro reads:

Peter Lunn, who has died aged 97, captained
the British skiing team at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen;
later, as a gentleman spy in the early Cold War years, he pioneered the idea of
digging tunnels under Soviet-controlled zones to facilitate telephone tapping.

Lunn was MI6 section chief in Vienna
immediately after the war, at the time of The Third Man, and in Berlin
in the mid-50s:

He went on to serve as head of station in
Bonn, and during the 1960s in Beirut, where he enjoyed skiing at The Cedars, a
resort where, as he recalled, discipline in the lift queues improved
dramatically after an attendant shot dead the two worst queue jumpers.

“Discipline” brings us, inevitably, to King
Crimson and their 1980s gamelan
period:

And for guitar saddos, here is a lonely guy
showing how to play Robert Fripp’s part (that’s him above). It sounds repetitive but those
shifting accents… I blame Steve Reich.

Monday, December 12, 2011

“Woke up this morning, got the old
remediation/ deferral of performance blues again.”

Carrie Miller
in the Australian edition (3 December) of the Spectator presents a prime
specimen of artwank
from an unidentified exhibition of contemporary art, presumably in Sydney where
she lives:

Performance functions as the absent-presence/ present-absence within
this group exhibition. Three broad strands of performance/artwork relationship
emerge in a cacophony of object and image forms and traces, indicating
something of the manner in which live action haunts so much of otherwise
apparently distinct contemporary practice. In one sense the exhibition might be
said to be predicated upon the remediation/ deferral of performance (or action)
in image form. In another way, it foregrounds the manifestation/
trace/sublimation of live action presented in the form of inanimate objects.
Then again, in select moments of “liveness” it presents the artist at work
through performance, manifesting in-situ, through time otherwise apparently
contradictory impulses towards disappearance and recuperation of performance as
both experience and category. Works throughout the exhibition apparently or
implicitly claim a lineage in the history of performance, whether in acts of
homage or simply as a strategic model. Simultaneously they demonstrate a
reinvestment of the performative within object making. Various performative modes
are both staged and foreclosed upon: gesture, action, ritual, exploration or
journey, labour, theatre, comedy [. . .]

Speaking of inanimate objects, here are
Godley & Creme in 1979 with “I Pity Inanimate Objects” from the album Freeze Frame. I bet Flight of the
Conchords are fans:

UPDATEPaul
Litterick, ace detective, has identified the above quote asthe work of curator Blair French who put
together the exhibition “Nothing Like
Performance” for Artspace
in Woolloomooloo. The exhibition runs until 22 December so, if you are in Sydney,
you will be able to see Paul Donald:

undertake live work daily, 11am-5pm, from
the opening of the exhibition until the completion of his work. He will simply
– or perhaps not so simply – attempt to build a bridge across the gallery
without formal plans or advance engineering. The structure will extend piece by
piece, always with the risk of collapse, of failure, with every new action.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Amazing but true: the great American
composer Elliott Carter
is still with us and today turns 103. He is still active: not only is he out
and about, but he is still
composing. Last Thursday he attended
the premiere of five of his recent works, all but one written in the
last 10 years. As Anthony Tommasini comments in the New York Times:

Never in the history of music has a major
composer still been producing significant pieces at such an age. Verdi was
pushing 80 when he finished his final masterpiece, “Falstaff.” Stravinsky
completed his last major piece, “Requiem Canticles,” at 84.

Here is Damien Thompson in the Daily Telegraph reviewing the world
premiere of Carter’s Conversations
for piano, percussion and chamber orchestra this June:

No doubt about it: at the age of 102,
Carter – interviewed in the video above – is really getting into his stride.

The video is part of a four-part interview
made in 2008 when the composer turned 100. It’s great – he talks about how when
he and his wife moved into their apartment e.e. cummings lived around
the corner and Marianne
Moore was just down the street. Here is part of his Symphony of Three Orchestras from 1976:

It has been a good
week for elderly composers: Henri Dutilleux,
96 next month, has won the
Kravis Prize, which comes with $US200,000 and a commission to compose a
piece for the New York Philharmonic. He isn’t going to write one but instead
will share the money with three other composers, whom the orchestra will choose
with his advice and who will each write a work in his honour. It’s a shame we
won’t get a new Dutilleux but the first composer selected is Peter Eötvös, who is a good
thing. In 1993 he wrote a piece for solo percussion titled Psalm 151, in memoriam Frank Zappa. If
you don’t believe me, you can listen to a snippet of it here.

Friday, December 9, 2011

In the September issue of the Literary
Review (the issue currently available here in New Zealand) Joan
Smith considers Robert Levine’s Free
Ride: How the internet is destroying the culture business and how the culture
business can fight back. The Businesweek review of the book is here,
here
is the Guardian and here
is the New York Times. See what I did
there? Illustrated the book’s theme, that people on the internet steal content.

The book sounds like a good, thoughtful
discussion of the issues. Near the end of her review Smith writes that Levine
is:

right to argue for a “content tax” –
effectively collectively licensing – that would allow media companies to
collect revenue in a system modelled on one that allows music companies to
collect for radio play.

She would say that, wouldn’t she: she is on
the board of ALCS,
the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society which is the UK equivalent of New
Zealand’s CLL, Copyright Licensing
Limited (disclosure: I am on its board) which does the same job of licensing
the use of copyright works. Digitisation is a huge issue for all such rights
organisations – it was relatively easy to manage photocopying in schools and
libraries but e-books open up a whole new Pandora’s box of digital worms.

Smith continues:

But I’d have liked to have seen him address
one of the most peculiar effects of the Internet, which has been to suspend the
moral obligations that consiumers observe in their offline behaviour. I’m not
aware of instances where shoppers who insist on “free content” via the Internet
put the same principle into practice in Tesco’s, clearing the shelves and
refusing to pay on the way out. Why some people feel it’s OK to expect
something for nothing when they consume online, but not in shops, is a
fascinating area for research.

Seems clear enough to me: people feel
anonymous online, just as looters do in a riot. Which is why people who would
never steal from a bookshop will happily download from Pirate Bay.

On the next page John
Sweeney (“There are three rules in journalism. First, find a crocodile.
Two, poke it in the eye with a stick. Three, stand back and report what happens
next”) reviews DarkMarket: Cyberthieves,
cybercops and you by Misha Glenny, which is about the hackers who steal
credit-card data, and along the way shows that England is just as two-degrees
of separation as New Zealand is:

The Nigerian, Adewale Taiwo, got four years
but served less than two. He was threatened with confiscation proceedings for
his ill-gotten gains of some £350,000. At the hearings the prosecutor mislaid a
key file, and the judge, Graham Robinson – he pinched my girlfriend one billion
years ago, but that’s another story – got fed up and declared the amount
swindled to be just £53,000. Taiwo preferred to spend a furtheryear in prison rather than hand over the
cash, but the prison authorities let him out anyway to deport him back to
Nigeria.

The magazine unfailingly reviews unpredictably
interesting books and matches them with predictably interesting reviewers. It
is, imho, best in class.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Is there such a thing? My hunch is that
most men would say no and most women would say yes. As does the Literary
Review. In 1993 the then editor, my hero Auberon Waugh, established
the Bad Sex award to highlight – and discourage – the “crude, tasteless, and
often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in
contemporary novels”.

The nominees were always novelists until
Tony Blair was nominated for his 2010 autobiography, A Journey, for this passage:

On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that
love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an
animal following my instinct .

Shelley Bridgeman wrote this
in the New Zealand Herald, an
allegedly serious newspaper, and Danyl McLauchlan wrote this
at the Dim-Post, an occasionally satirical blog, in response. I think he is our
best satirist since AK
Grant.

It’s a competition – enter it! I’m not going to because Matt Nippert and Andrew Geddis already have and
are much funnier than I could ever be, but do have a look – many of the entries
are outstanding.

I’ve closed off comments on the Shelley
writes the classics thread, because Keri Hulme has agreed to judge the
entries and declare a winner. Winning criteria, date and time of the
announcement and prize for best entry will all be subject to the merciless whims
of Keri Hulme.